Death sentence concludes Coatesville chainsaw homicide

One of Chester County’s most grisly homicides was resolved in historic fashion in November, when a Common Pleas Court jury imposed the death sentence on defendant Laquanta Chapman for the 2008 murder of a Coatesville teenager.

The penalty was the first time in nearly two decades that a penal of 12 jurors had unanimously decided to impose the ultimate penalty on a defendant in a murder case, and only the second time such a decision came from a jury since the death penalty was reinstated in Pennsylvania in the late 1970s.

Chapman, a 33-year-old New Jersey native who moved to Coatesville to be with his family, was convicted after a three-week long trial of first-degree murder in the October 2008 death of 16-year-old Aaron Turner, a Coatesville Area Senior High who lived across the street from him. Chapman was apparently angered at Turner over a drug deal that had soured.

A defense attorney for Chapman argued that his upbringing in the hellish public housing projects of Newark, N.J., including physical abuse by his father and years of neglect by foster families and his relatives, had left him psychologically damaged to the extent that he deserved the jury’s mercy.

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But testimony by Turner’s family about the impact his loss had had on their lives was apparently enough to sway the panel to decide unanimously to sentence Chapman to death.

In December, Judge William P. Mahon, who had presided over Chapman’s case as it made its way through the criminal justice system for more than three years, formally sentenced the drug dealer and violent felon to die by lethal injection. He also added more than 100 years of imprisonment on other charges to his sentence, insuring that should the murder conviction be overturned, Chapman would remain behind bars.

“Most of the people who stand before me are not evil, they are just behaving badly,” Mahon told Chapman at his sentencing hearing on Dec. 21, noting that many times he gives self-described “long-winded” lectures to criminal defendants in hopes they will take his advice to heart and turn their lives around, helping both themselves and society.

“That makes it a win-win situation,” Mahon explained. But he added that he saw no such hope in Chapman’s character. “Mr. Chapman, there is no win-win in this. You are evil, and not fit to walk among us.”

Turner, an engaging, friendly teenager who had dreams of attending Penn State and becoming an automobile mechanic, was last seen by his mother, Angeline Blaylock, as he left home to attend a community service project in downtown Coatesville the afternoon of Oct. 30, 2008.

On the way there, he encountered Chapman, who lured him to his home on South Chester Avenue. Inside, with help from another man, Chapman beat Turner, forced him into his basement, made him strip to his underwear, and shot him dead. Days later, with the help of his cousin from New Jersey, Chapman dismembered Turner’s body with a pair of chainsaws, stuffing the parts in garbage bags. He also killed a pit bull and chopped up its body to try to disguise the murder.

After they determined in November 2008 that Turner had been killed, police for weeks searched the Lanchester Landfill looking for his body. It has never been found.

Speaking for herself and members of Turner’s family during the trial, his grandmother Valerie Feaster summed up the way the victim was thought of. “Everybody loved Aaron,” she said.